Andy Bell has confirmed that he and Vince Clarke are working on a new Erasure album.
The 61-year-old singer explained that the synth-pop duo will release their first album since 2020’s ‘The Neon’ and admits that it will be particularly poignant following the death of Clarke’s wife Tracy Hurley Martin from stomach cancer last year.
Andy told Gold Derby: “So many things have happened in between, for Vince especially.
“We’ve visited each other. I had some songs sent by Vince to me, and then we got together, started writing. We haven’t finished. We are meeting again in August, so we want to get it right. We want the right feeling, and we’ll know. … We are a family.
“And I’m going to call him after this (interview), because I want him to know that we are here. I’m here. He’s not the easiest person to get through to, but we’ve had some really lovely conversations since. So, yeah, I love him.”
Andy came out as gay long before Erasure started having hits in the 1980s but felt that the ‘A Little Respect’ hitmakers weren’t taken as seriously by critics as they weren’t as political as other queer acts at the time such as Bronski Beat.
He explained: “Jimmy Somerville was at the forefront for me. He was a foot soldier, and I felt like I was kind of in the background because we were vocal, but not as political.
“But I kind of felt like the appeal to the ordinary man or woman, you just made (homosexuality) a normal-conversation kind of thing. Therefore, I would never go in the front in marches, which seems a bit cowardly – but I didn’t want to be arrested! But we did the die-ins and all those kinds of things for Stonewall.”
Andy admits that it was “really scary” being out as attitudes towards homosexuality were very different at Erasure’s peak.
He said: “It was very scary. Even performing in the US at that time, you just didn’t know what was going to happen at any time.
“Sometimes I was grateful that we weren’t played on the radio, because I didn’t want my profile to be that high that everybody knew all at once. So, maybe I was slightly ‘closeted’ in my being out.”